Double Fine: Schafer speaks out on industry’s ‘hire & fire’ attitude

Double Fine’s Tim Shcafer has spoken out against the current trend of studio lay-offs that come once a project is complete, suggesting that developers are losing out on vital knowledge that could be put to better use.

GI.biz reports – by way of a Wired interview – “One of the most frustrating things about the games industry is that teams of people come together to make a game, and maybe they struggle and make mistakes along the way, but by the end of the game they’ve learned a lot – and this is usually when they are disbanded.”

“Instead of being allowed to apply all those lessons to a better, more efficiently produced second game, they are scattered to the winds and all that wisdom is lost. After Psychonauts, we could have laid off half our team so that we’d have more money and time to sign Brütal Legend.”

“But doing so would have meant breaking up a team that had just learned how to work well together. And what message would that have sent to our employees? It would say that we’re not loyal to them, and that we don’t care. Which would make them wonder ‘Why should we be loyal to this company?'”

“If you’re not loyal to your team you can get by for a while, but eventually you will need to rely on their loyalty to you and it just won’t be there.”

What’s your take on the process of letting teams go once the job is done? Is that loss of knowledge a waste? Let us know below.

VG247 recently interviewed Double Fine about the industry and the power of being an indie studio. Check out what they said here: